Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tozen | Hacker News Reader

How things can go down on HN strikes me as odd, and this seems to be an example. "People" suddenly seem to be quite supportive of: 1) Has not released an alpha yet and after a year. 2) Website that promises a lot (like 2-way C++ interoperability). 3) Clearly telling people it will have trouble supporting the Windows OS. 4) Has relatively limited stars and contributors on GitHub. 5) Wishlists and promises are suddenly fine by them.

Then for other languages its media blackout, hate, and an avalanche of trolling. I suppose the hidden machinery and utility accounts don't come out, unless "they" perceive an actual threat to its position.

Don't get me wrong, love new languages and seeing more competition. People should follow their dreams. Just weirds me out, as to how reactions and perception goes.

View on HN

People were rightfully critical of V for over promising and under delivering as well as misrepresenting the capabilities of the language.

Val has promised a lot and hasn't delivered anything, so I think it's fine to be interested/ excited but have a heavy dose of scepticism as well.

It seems V is now delivering quite well.

Not only did detractors flag away my previous response that agreed with your point about how V delivers, but based on their MO (preoccupation with 2019, same catch phrases, and constantly spamming the same certain sites), it's likely the same group and their dedicated accounts for such purposes. They are trying very hard to push a negative narrative and eliminate the public viewing of any counter or supportive arguments.

Can you please list here examples of under delivering and misrepresenting?

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar on this topic. It's extremely tedious, it's happened dozens of times already, and we don't need any more of this.

I'm sure your programming language is just fine. What's far from fine are these flamewars. Everybody, on all sides of this, needs to stop doing it on HN. Other forums are fine with flamewars; please conduct them there instead. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As you're well aware, there were a series of articles written about this[0][1] which were popular on HN a few years back. This is well documented, reproducible, and done in good faith.

Now, I just want to make it clear that my exact wording here was "people were rightfully critical of V" and not "people are rightfully critical of V" (emphasis added). My intent is not to malign the current state of V, because 1) I do not keep up with the language and 2) it isn't relevant to the point being made.

The parent comment was drawing a comparison between "other languages" (which, by now, it's apparent that they're speaking primarily about V) and Val when it comes to HN's reaction. If we're going to compare, it only makes sense to compare them at similar stages of development / release. So, in this case we're talking about early release V and what was promised versus delivered. It does not matter what is being done in service of users now because the criticism I'm referring to isn't from now, but when the initial HN impressions of V were formed.

[0]: https://xeiaso.net/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23

[1]: https://xeiaso.net/blog/vlang-update-2020-06-17

These articles have stuff like "V depends on git and electricity" and benchmarking debug builds of V with a slow backend. The author also said that V must die.

Can you please list here actual examples of under delivering and misrepresenting?

> Then for other languages its media blackout, hate, and an avalanche of trolling. I suppose the hidden machinery and utility accounts don't come out, unless "they" perceive an actual threat to its position.

? I dunno where you’re getting this from.

Pony? Zig? Crystal? Carp? Taichi? Dex? Vale?

The reception has been generally positive imo? Vale got some complaints for being very rough, but the reception was pretty much ok?

I mean, those are just things I’ve seen flow past on HN, so maybe others drop off and never see the light of day, but that’s true of most links on HN in general.

To rise up and then get heaps of negativity seems unusual for a programming language?

You sound quite “conspiracy theory” with this, and I think you’re sitting in a weird echo chamber.

If anything, I’d say the big difference is that this is broadly speaking a technical audience; a language that is not pitched at a technical audience (or exaggerates for marketing purposes like getting funding) will just get downvoted as spam.

Val has an open source compiler you can look at right now (not vapour), clearly points out it’s not ready for use, but has big ideas.

Doesn’t seem like you need a “deep state” to be enthusiastic about competent people building a new language, and having a chance to push it in a direction you personally want as it evolves.

> You sound quite “conspiracy theory” with this...

It's not based on conspiracy or throwing out a quick unresearched opinion to just smite someone. It's based on search, and reading posts made on HN (over the years).

> (exaggerates for marketing purposes like getting funding) will just get downvoted....

> (not vapour), clearly points out it’s not ready for use, but has big ideas...

The difference is, being consistent with handing out such punishments (downvoting) and giving negative labels (vapor). Treat all the languages the same or equally apply those rules, otherwise the hypocrisy shows itself. Don't be so angry or surprised that someone may comment on it or point it out.

And when using terms like "vapor", let it be one's original thought, and not what is supplied by others painting a certain narrative.

> The difference is, being consistent with handing out such punishments (downvoting) and giving negative labels (vapor). Treat all the languages the same or equally apply those rules

???

Isn’t that literally what I’m doing with my examples of like 6 different programming languages?

> Don't be so angry or surprised

I apologise if I somehow came across as angry; I’m simply stating a fact.

There is no conspiracy.

Communities aren't monoliths.

The groups of people who criticize real tangible languages and people who have the skills to critique the design of abstract language design don't necessarily overlap.

> Then for other languages its media blackout, hate, and an avalanche of trolling [...] > Just weirds me out, as to how reactions and perception goes.

The prog lang world is a massive circle jerk, with plenty of toxicity, extreme fanboy-ism and haters.

Hard to argue against the truth or the reality of it.

Being supported by Adobe, having Dave Abrahms and Sean Parent, kind of gives it bonus points.

This is not a random language.

This seems like a kneejerk reaction to the topmost comment not being critical. There's plenty of critique and skepticism if you read past the top, be it the name, parts of the docs, whether their mutable value semantics work, etc.

It seems to be a coin flip. Whichever comment gets upvoted early on continues to be upvoted and becomes the consensus.

I think the interest in this project is also peaked by the fact that some of the people behind the project are quite well-known and respected members of the C++ (and Swift) communities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com